re:publica is on
Re:publica has summoned the German blogosphere to the Kalkscheune, just a couple of blocks from my office in Berlin-Mitte. With 700 attendees over three days it appears that a substantial portion came.
Does it make any sense to go to a blog meeting - wouldn’t it be better to stay at home and use the time to read? Certainly not, if I consider today. Many of the aspects of social software (and interactions of people in general) were said before but the discussions put them in a new light.
One noteworthy tidbit from the panel on blog etiquette this afternoon was the notion of blogs as a “pragmatic medium”, one that provokes direct response, uttered by Rainer Kuhlen (UNESCO chair in communications). In contrast, classical journalism as seen in newspapers are not written with the intentions for communication in the other direction. Most scientific works are published with a similar mind set: The discussion is part of manuscript, not contributed by the readers. After something has been published and passed peer review, it is true until retracted or forgotten.
The most common argument for the lack of participation in the scientific blogosphere is lack of incentives but we need to consider that we do not publish to be discussed in the first place.
Hmm. This didn’t read like a truism this morning. Let’s talk about tech instead.
A nice gadget enables everyone to comment on the presentations (or cocktail bars in the vicinity) via SMS. Not that the comments added much to the discussion for most of the time but the level of participation is what I want for any conference.
[Picture by timk75 under CC by-at license]
April 11th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Thank you for posting this. I was trying to figure out what Re publica is, and your post enabled me to find out in English. I can see it’s not a band
it’s an important conference!
April 12th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Thanks for considering the garbled collections of words above as English, particular the version from yesterday night, which has been streamlined now.
April 12th, 2007 at 10:17 am
but we need to consider that we do not publish to be discussed in the first place
No, but our bosses pretend that we do. This falls into my “lies of science” category
April 14th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
I don’t see much of a difference age/level wise and discussing one’s work is a crucial aspect of any research project. To some extent, we did not have the proper tools for fast discussions in earlier days and not all comments need to be published for everyone to read.
April 14th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
In same cases there is some discussion going on in traditional publishing. In bioinformatics for example there is a lot of methods papers that are discussing the limitations of previous approaches and are usually (the good ones) done is a way that is easy to take the same data to compare methods. Also, in terms of paradigms and models there is discussion. For example discussions over how cells compute signaling events, the existence or not of modularity, the effectiveness of the network model to think about cellular biology, etc. It is just that this happens on longer time frame and it is only a very small fraction of what is published.
April 15th, 2007 at 12:02 am
Of course there is discussion - the point I became aware of is that we do not publish open papers. A particular publication will not just present the data and leave it to the readers to discuss modularity but take a position on the matter (for good reason).
May 16th, 2007 at 6:57 am
[...] Most of my dear readers will have either noticed or written about the lack of comments on scientific articles, for instance at the BMC journals and most notably at PLoS ONE, which was designed for interaction of author and reader. At this point, there’s not too much to add to the conclusions: It’s takes to much time to comment on a scientific article properly, there’s no incentive (can’t put it in your CV) or honor to be gained (no one asked me to review this) and they are not written to be discussed (open/pragmatic) but supposed to discuss the results thoroughly themselves. However, despite all the comments on the matter, trying to study the phenomenon on the web is difficult due to the lack of strong keywords: Searching for “comments on publications” does not take you to very informative resources. Similar discussions were underway in the Usenet and a particular consideration on the lack of comments made into Wikipedia as Warnock’s dilemma, which I stumbled across by chance. The term did not stick but it’s a worthwhile keyword for research in communication in blogs and scientific publications. Most of the considerations listed can be applied to all forms of written electronic communication. [...]